I think voting should be made difficult...

...This country is so bizarrely schizophrenic about voting it drives me crazy. We are constantly bathed in platitudes about how vital, wonderful, special, glorious and sacred voting is. But don't you dare ask the American people to put the slightest bit of effort into the practice. It must be convenient. It must be easy. It must be on my timetable, like a DVR'd episode of "Nashville" or the "Price is Right." Why not ask the American people to demonstrate that they appreciate the importance of voting?...

October 24, 2012

The Empty Chair of Dorian Gray...

...Talk about wearing your politics on your sleeve. An elitist clique of fashion designers has banded together to raise money for celebrity-in-chief Barack Obama and browbeat their customers into supporting him. Even worse, the Beautiful People who dress the Powerful People are putting increased pressure on conservatives to stay out of the business altogether.

I suppose Ann will be gracious and conciliatory, but oh how I long for her to slam those animals hard. I'd love to have her chief of staff announce that Ann feels that the ravaged visages of Wintour or Diane von Fürstenberg are perfect "Dorian Gray" portraits revealing what liberalism and the Democrat Party have become--old and morally debauched. Old old OLD.

And that Mrs Romney is going to be wearing dresses by some cool young Israeli designers....

This post is very clear and concise on Benghazi...

...It gets even worse. The men in the consulate contacted the White House by phone at 10 PM Libya time, 4 PM Washington time when the attack began, and the White House was able to communicate with them and watch the attack in real time while it was occurring, thanks to a drone overhead.

The president could have ordered F-18s to fly overhead on afterburners and even fire into the mob, something that's worked in the past when it comes to dispersing attackers. They could have been there in an hour. He could have immediately ordered a full contingent of Special Operations Forces to fly in from the U.S. military base in Sigonella, Sicily. They could have been on the ground in less than three hours.

The president did nothing except to belatedly order a 22 man force to proceed from our embassy in Tripoli, about the same distance away as Sigonella. They did not arrive at Benghazi airport until 4 AM Libya time, six hours after the attack began.

By that time, Ambassador Stevens and three other Americans were dead.

They died because they were not treated as American personnel under attack who needed to be rescued, but as a situation to be managed so as not to offend Muslim sensibilities. And after their deaths, they became a political problem to be handled so as not to embarrass this president. So a scenario was concocted about a spontaneous protest aggravated over a video.It was a scenario that everyone directly from President Obama on down knew was false.

These e-mails and other information about the Benghazi debacle would likely not have surfaced if it hadn't been for President Obama's insistence that the White House was 'not informed', and his blaming the entire fiasco on the State Department and the intelligence community. Apparently some of the people involved in this didn't take kindly to that.

For President Obama, there's no cover, no spin and no excuses possible any more, although I'm sure the attempt will be made. What happened in Benghazi was the culmination of his failed foreign policy in the Middle East,and his reacting as he did a perfect example of his weakness and lack of character.

It was the ultimate appeasement in a failed presidency....

Yeah. And they were probably calculating what effect action would have on those cowardly hermaphrodites, the "undecided voters," may they have a special circle in hell allotted to them. Which is also presumably why Romney didn't blast Obama over this in the last debate.

October 22, 2012

Only the most skilled photographers can do this...

Just kidding. Pure luck, photographing the flash.

That's my older son with his new Ruger Mini 14. Very nice weapon! He and I had a lot of fun shooting last weekend. It's a cool thing for a father when his son surpasses him in some way. He teaches me about firearms.

Ha ha. Think up a new scam, slimeblls...

...Wow. If the world is really doomed, it is amazing that there wasn't one question about global warming, and indeed, I don't think any of the candidates for POTUS or VPOTUS even mentioned it. Talk about a dead issue! Well, at least Al Gore became one of the 1%....

October 21, 2012

A "modern iteration of the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism"

This is just an odd bit of something plucked from the Internet torrent that goes pouring by my porch. Link from Instapundit. I post it because it echoes many of my thoughts. "Narcissism that results from the focus on personal gratification" sounds a lot like the nihilism that I go on about. And it is the Information Age that has unleashed it--the Industrial Age with its strong propensity for stability helped to reinforce and preserve traditional faiths and habits of mind, though they were slowly eroding all the while. Once the Info Age hit it was Katie bar the door!

...In the modern iteration of the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, the narcissism that results from the focus on personal gratification via consumption cripples the person in the workplace. Ironically, the flattening of corporate management and the demands for higher interpersonal skillsets has eroded the security provided by the strict hierarchy of previous eras.

Instead of working less and doing easier work--the implicit promise of "endless growth"-- the work is becoming more challenging and insecure even as compensation declines.

If there is any personality that is unsuited for the "New Normal" workplace, it is the narcissistic consumer--the very type of person that our consumption-dependent economy creates, nurtures and demands. That is the new Cultural Contradiction of Capitalism.

"Personal gratification" is the driver of narcissism and consumerism, which are two sides of the same coin. Consumerist marketing glorifies the "projected self" as the "true self," encouraging self-absorption even as it erodes authentic identity, self-esteem and the resilience which enables emotional growth--the essential characteristic of adulthood.

Personal gratification is of a piece with self-absorption, fragile self-esteem and an identity that is overly dependent on consumerist signifiers and the approval of others.

No wonder Japan's "lost generations" are lost: not only are expectations of secure, high-income jobs diminished, the work is more demanding and the security and pay are too low to support the consumerist lifestyle that society has implicitly promised everyone who goes to college and works hard as a birthright....

And this piece is perfectly appropriate as one of my Sunday thingies. Jesus taught that that "focus on personal gratification " was exactly the wrong path to take. And in the Information Age it's going to be ten times as bad. Because navigation is at least ten times as difficult. To try to guide yourself while looking at yourself is folly. If you fill your "self" with consumer rubbish.... Oh brother.

...Anyone who thinks he already has it all, so he can take what he wants and center everything on himself, is depriving himself of giving what he otherwise could. Man is not there to make himself, but to respond to demands made upon him. We all stand in a great arena of history, and are dependent on each other. A man ought not, therefore, just to figure out what he would like, but to ask what he can do and how he can help. Then he will see that fulfillment does not lie in comfort, ease, and following ones inclinations, but precisely in allowing demands to be made upon you, in taking the harder path. Everything else turns out somehow boring anyway. Only the man who "risks the fire", who recognizes a calling within himself, a vocation, an ideal he must satisfy, who takes on real responsibility, will find fulfillment. As we have said, it is not in taking, not on the path of comfort, that we become rich, but only in giving.
-- Josef Cardinal Ratzinger

October 11, 2012

More climate BS exposed...

...All sorts of wailing came from that by climate alarmists. The New Scientist claimed there were megatonnes of methane bubbling out at that time. It was even billed under "Arctic Climate Emergency" All of this came from a single paper published in the AGU Geophysical Research Letters. In January 2012, perhaps sensing that it really was hyped up, an essay at RealClimate "Much ado about methane" said:

Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, but it also has an awesome power to really get people worked up, compared to other equally frightening pieces of the climate story.

Yep. I can recall lots of terrified comments here at WUWT about this, plus some emails along the lines of "if you don't pay attention to this you're going to denialist hell".

Well, a new more comprehensive on-site study has been done, and it has just been announced by the Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel:...

October 7, 2012

A little Sunday something for "social justice" Catholics...

...and all the other fake-liberals who think caring for the poor should be left to big government. For those who think you can be both Christian and Leftist. (The items are from Britain's NHS, National Health Service.)

This is PRECISELY what Obama and Pelosi and Reid and all those other "liberal" animals want for us. This IS "Obamacare" a few decades down the line...

.Forty-three hospital patients starved to death last year and 111 died of thirst while being treated on wards, new figures disclose today....

* there were 558 cases where doctors recorded that a patient had died in a state of severe dehydration in hospitals;

* 78 hospital and 39 care home patients were killed by bedsores, while a further 650 people who died had their presence noted on their death certificates;

* 21,696 were recorded as suffering from septicemia when they died, a condition which experts say is most often associated with infected wounds.

The records, from the Office for National Statistics, follow a series of scandals of care of the elderly, with doctors forced to prescribe patients with drinking water or put them on drips to make sure they do not become severely dehydrated ...

...In Alexandra Hospital in Redditch, Worcestershire, doctors resorted to prescribing patients with drinking water to ensure nurses did not forget, a report from inspectors warned in May last year.

The Care Quality Commission recorded one case where an elderly patient was found to be malnourished when they were admitted to the ward, yet not reassessed until 16 days later.

In many wards nurses were dumping meal trays in front of patients too weak to feed themselves and then taking them away again untouched.

A report by the Health Service Ombudsman last year condemned the NHS for its inhumane treatment of the most vulnerable.

The investigation found patients were left hungry, unwashed or given the wrong drugs because of the "casual indifference of staff"...

...In July, an inquest heard that a young man who died of dehydration at a leading hospital rang 999 for police because he was so thirsty.

Officers arrived at Kane Gorny's bedside, but were told by nurses that he was in a confused state and were sent away.

The footballer and runner, 22, died of dehydration a few hours later, an inquest heard in July...

UPDATE: I think this stuff is really euthanasia. But not done consciously. These are sort of "Freudian slips" out of the collective unconscious of a culture of death. Expect more of this. All European countries are in demographic collapse, and all be having increasing percentages of elderly people in coming decades, and stagnant economies unable to cope.

Today's joke...

The friend who sent this was in the same second grade class as I. We didn't become pals until we were in the memorable Mrs Cunningham's fourth grade class...

A fleeing Taliban, desperate for water, was plodding through the Afghan desert when he saw something far off in the distance.

Hoping to find water, he hurried toward the oasis, only to find a little old Jewish man at a small stand, selling ties.

The Taliban asked, "Do you have water?"

The Jewish man replied, "I have no water. Would you like to buy a tie? They are only $5."

The Taliban shouted, "Idiot! I do not need an over-priced tie. I need water! I should kill you, but I must find water first!"

"OK," said the old Jewish man, "It does not matter that you do not want to buy a tie and that you hate me. I will show you
that I am bigger than that. If you continue over that hill to the east for about two miles, you will find a lovely restaurant.
It has all the ice cold water you need. Shalom."

October 6, 2012

Them little critters will just jump up and bite you...

This has got to be the kookiest of warning labels. The protractor in this package is about 5" long. But you should wear eye protection! Lordy, what a flabby age we live in.

WORD NOTE: My Army Reserve son has brought home Army slang: "Eye-pro" and "ear-pro." I've started to say the same. Short punchy terms are good things. And as a cabinetmaker, I say: "Wear your ear-pro and eye-pro. (For power tools I mean. Not protractors.) Nobody has tough eyeballs or ear nerves!"